Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol 10, No 1 (2012)
WRITING CENTER ASSESSMENT: AN ARGUMENT FOR CHANGE Kristen Welch Longwood University kristen.d.welch@gmail.com
Susan Revels-Parker Longwood University leslie.revelsparker@live.longwood.edu
Assessment embodies the potential for change if used to its fullest advantage. For any writing center, assessment can build arguments for additional or continued funding, staffing, or space on campus. It can also provide an explanation of (and defense of) the value of its services to the campus community. Yet an assessment must have accurate outcomes and collect accurate data to build these arguments. Inspired by the desire to create a new, part time or full-time position in the writing center for the director, the pilot assessment at Longwood University (a small liberal arts college nestled in central Virginia) was designed to show the center’s effectiveness at helping to improve student writing, at helping to increase a student’s confidence about writing, at offering excellent professional development to the tutors and to the graduate assistant, at satisfying the needs of both students who use the center and the faculty who send them there, and at showing increasing amounts of usage to indicate positive growth. Thus, the pilot assessment was designed to show proof of the effectiveness of the center in order to ensure its longevity, along with the need for a permanent director so it would be able to reach more students through consistent leadership. As assessment takes center stage on the “to do” list of writing center directors, it is important to consider several aspects of building a coherent pilot such as context, audience, data collection, and possibilities for collaboration with faculty and the Office of Assessment and Institutional Research. In this paper, we will explore seven key questions for designing an effective pilot that address each of these areas.
6. How can you partner with your own Office of Assessment and Institutional Research to establish a plan, collect needed data, and analyze results? 7. How can you publish the results to help others and to be rewarded for your work? How can you use the assessment process to mentor graduate students or junior faculty on campus? 1. Who should be in charge of assessment at your institution? Most people would assume the director of the writing center would always be in charge, but this is not always the case. In “Assessing the Writing Center: A Qualitative Tale of a Quantitative Study,” Doug Enders describes his experience with allowing someone from the Institutional Research office to conduct the assessment. For one, the interpretation of purely quantitative data allows the attitude of the assessor to affect the portrayal of results since there is no clear way to quantify the effect the writing center has on students’ writing ability, student retention, or even student grades. Most of the published narratives of writing center assessments agree that the relationship between the writing center and its positive effect on students is a weak cause/effect argument without proper contextualization (Bell 2000; Lerner 2003; North 1994). In Ender’s article he writes that in all of the quantitative studies the IR person ran, the correlation between the center’s work and a student’s writing ability, choice to finish a degree at that institution, and/or grades was too weak to have any real meaning (9). If the administration had not already been favorable toward the center, it was a real possibility that the budget could have been negatively impacted (8). At Longwood University, it is the choice of our OAIR office to always put faculty in charge of assessments in order to use the experience and expertise of faculty with the subject area in question to create a logical, usable assessment. So when the administration asks who should be in charge of the assessment, they might consider three things: 1. who has the most at stake, 2. who has the greatest amount of knowledge and experience with the subject at hand, and 3., who will be responsible for making changes in response to the assessment? It is difficult to convince
The Process for Creating Heuristics for Getting Started
a
Pilot:
The seven questions are: 1. Who should be in charge of the assessment at your institution? 2. What kinds of challenges does your writing center face? 3. What are your goals for the assessment? 4. What’s the mission of the writing center? 5. What kinds of data do you already collect and how it is useful for measuring the outcomes you define?